CHAPTER 5 Standoff (I)

Music in Society: Britten

Chapter:

CHAPTER 5 Standoff (I)

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin

Art remains outside the line of human conduct, with an end, rules, and values which are not those of the man but of the work
to be produced. Hence the despotic and all-absorbing power of art, as also its astonishing power of soothing: it frees from
every human care, it establishes the artifex, artist or artisan, in a world apart, cloistered, defined, and absolute, in which
to devote all the strength and intelligence of his manhood to the service of the thing which he is making.1

—Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (1920)

A relationship of opposites had come into being; art had become a critical mirror, showing the irreconcilable nature of the
aesthetic and the social worlds.2

—Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project” (1981)

Art is neither a mirror nor a substitute for the world. It is an addition to that universal reality which contains natural
man and shows the infinite varieties of ways that man can be.3

Before plunging into the home stretch of the “relative present,” the historically undistanced recent past, it is time, in
this chapter and the next, for a stocktaking. The essential question of modern art, as it was understood by modern artists
during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and the essential debate, was whether artists lived in history or in
society. Posed literalistically, of course, the question is absurd. Everybody, artists included, obviously lives in both,
and society (like everything else human) is a product of history. But as a metaphor for values and loyalties, the question
crystallizes the dilemma of a period in which the values and loyalties of artists had become polarized to the point of crisis.
In the minds of many, one served one's art or one's society, and loyalty to the one precluded loyalty to the other. One had
to choose.